It would be pretty much impossible to talk about this book without mentioning the following…Midsommar, Blair Witch Project and the story of Roanoke. The first two seem to be getting more play due to sheer popularity, but here’s the thing…both of those movies were kind of crappy, pretty sh*t, in fact. Blair Witch singlehandedly introduced the found footage genre, ushering into the world both a very low budget option to scare the audience and the tedious shaking camera technique to nauseate them. It isn’t by any means a good or an especially scary movie, but it is an original. And, for the purposes of this comparison, it features a group of individuals lost in the creepy woods with a witchy presence around. Midsommar is a different beast altogether, it’s a highbrow genre movie that takes on all the worst attributes of an arthouse flick until the entire thing become an exercise in patience and fortitude. It’s intolerably long, slow and overdone. Its main appeal being the inherent creepiness of a religious cult in an isolated Scandinavian location and, more so, the inherent creepiness of stumbling into a thing like that and not being able to leave. Which works for the present comparison. The Roanoke thing…well, that’s obvious. Title obvious. The lost village, the mysterious disappearance of an entire population. That’s precisely how this story goes…in 1959 an entire population of a remote Swedish village, nearly 900 souls, had mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth. All the left behind was a brutally murdered local woman and a newborn baby crying in a schoolhouse. No clues, no answers. Until now, nearly 60 years later, when an ambitious documentary maker with familial ties to the village comes there with four friends and colleagues for an exploratory initial shoot. The goal is to investigate, poke around, get enough footage to secure funding for the complete project, it’s only meant to be five days. It’ll be five days they will never forget. (That’s tagline right there). Right off the bet, things start going sideways, but then again most of it can be easily explained away by their extremely creepy surroundings, a village that from certain angles looks merely quiet and sleepy, but up close long abandoned and dangerously decrepit. Things escalate proportionally and, while still plausibly explicable, soon the rationale begins to take a step back and the very nature of the place starts oozing its darkness around them. It’s essentially a sort of thing that works both supernaturally and naturally, it’s profoundly darkly atmospheric and oh so spooky in the best possible way. A claustrophobic nightmare of the highest caliber. Definitively more effective than Blair Witch, infinitely more dynamic than Midsommar (although, technically that’s most things) and just as conceptually terrifying as Roanoke a.k.a. the sheer concept of a place erased from time, this books works on every level and so well too. The writing draws you in completely. Even the bright blue skies outside do nothing to lessen the inherent creepiness of the narrative, though this is definitely a book best read under the cover of night. The narrative splits the timeline between 1959 and present day, unevenly so and favoring the Now, but it is the Then chapters that are most harrowing in a way, a life closing in on the people, after the main source of income for the village gets shut down and a charismatic new pastor arrives. It’s the same old premise, the tragic neverchanging story of the great evil arising out of restlessness and economic strife. People at their most frustrated, their most tired and financially beaten down will turn to find hope, reason and meaning in the darkest places. Reductively, but efficiently It explains most of the horrifying political ascents of dictatorships, etc. This small village can serve as a microcosm for the darkest aspects of social psychology. Or it can just scare the socks off of you. Either way, it’s such a great read. Terrifying, immersive, exciting. A genuinely trilling thriller. A genuinely scary frightfest. Well written, vividly conceptualized, with complex characters and perfectly sustained suspense. Plus the sheer pleasure of Scandinavian noir writing at its finest. Literary, economic, potent. Really excellent all around, Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This was dark and atmospheric. I liked how it went back and forth in time and that the mystery of what happened gets solved at the end. However, some of it was fairly predictable.

Kindly received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Oh this was a dark and cold and awful book that I very much enjoyed reading. I tend to be a touch leery of tag lines like "a mix of Midsommar and Blair Witch" but I can't think of a more apt description myself.

In the wilds of the Swedish wilderness, a lonely, emotionally fragile film maker takes a rag tag crew to scout a mysteriously abandoned village as a location for a chilling documentary. Almost immediately they learn that the village is not exactly abandoned after all.

The very talented Camilla Sten weaves the story of her intrepid and, lets face it, doomed film crew with a tragic and haunting tale of how the lost village became lost and then pulls all the string together in a thrilling and terrible climax.

This was excellent and well worth a read for any fan of slow burn, smart supernatural mysteries with a cast of characters you desperately root for even when you know there's no hope at all. Truly chilling and surprisingly moving, I simply couldn't put it down.

A whole village of people vanishes without a trace, in 1959. There is only a severely tortured, and rotting body of a woman tied to a pole, and a wailing new born baby left behind.

Filmmaker Alice has been fascinated by the vanishing residents of this village, called Silvertjarn, and wants to make a documentary out of it. Her grandmother’s younger sister, father and mother were among those unfortunate ones that disappeared in the village.

Along with a small crew, she goes to the abandoned village to try and make a documentary about what actually happened on that fateful day and what caused the mysterious disappearance of so many people.

Soon, strange and eerie things start to happen. They see and hear someone other than themselves. A crew member goes missing and their equipment is blown up. It seems that they’re not alone in that ghost town.

The story unfolds through two different timelines, one in the past, in 1959, narrated by Alice’s great grandmother and another in the present, which is from Alice’s point of view.
This makes the story more engaging as we can see the events which led up to the incident, in the past and the discovery of the truth in the present.

The characters are well thought out with a lot of depth.

The story starts off a little slow but gets more interesting as it progresses and one wants to get to the bottom of the mystery.

It’s certainly a great addition to the thriller and mystery genres, and I would recommend this book for people who love reading books with some page turning thrills and a central mystery.

Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an advance reader’s copy for an honest review.

I'm not going to leave negative feedback for this one, because it might end up being a really good book people will like. But for me, personally, it was a DNF because I think the translation just didn't work for me as well as it might for others. I just couldn't get into this one. But I'd order it for the store...I never turn down horror titles!

What an unexpectedly good story. Without giving too much away, we see a group of young men and women going into an abandoned village to film footage for a potential documentary. Are they alone in the village? The people of the village disappeared without a trace years ago. Except for one infant. We are given glimpses of life in the village thru letters and flashbacks, and finally find out what happened to them. Very disturbing, and well written.

I didn't know what kind of story that Camilla Sten would have, but I knew that if Viveca Sten worked with her it couldn't be bad. I was amazed that it was so realistic that Alice and Tone came out of it with little to no hard breaks at all. This story Is about Alice's grandmother's story of Silvertjärn where all the people, some 1000, were lost to the world and Alice's attempt to make a documentary film about it. We have Alice and Tone plus Emmy, Alice's first friend, Max and Robert who were there for support of Alice and Emmy. What first starts off the mystery, is after Tone falls through the stairs in the school. Emmy drives for miles until she gets her mother on the phone to resolve what to do with Tone and her foot. But when she gets back and they hunt for Tone they hear a bomb go off and find their trucks and cars are destroyed with all their equipment. I won't go into detail about the rest of the story but you won't believe me with what happens. Two of the people are killed. But that's the question who did it? Tone who's missing? Read the story and find out for yourself. I gave it 4 stars out of five.

A young independent documentary film maker achieves a lifelong dream of visiting what is known as the ghost village of Silvertjarn to carry out some initial filming in preparation for a much bigger project. Alice's family lived in the village and her Grandmother has told her the story of the mass disappearance of the villagers 60 years previously, and the grisly discovery made when the outside world became aware that something had happened to the people of Silvertjarn. Am not going to say anymore about the plot as you need to read and enjoy it.

The story is told through a dual narrative then and now and the tension builds as Alice and her crew of 4 begin to feel unsettled by the atmosphere in the village. The format works well as the tension builds both in the then and now at the same time, leaving you the reader feeling unnerved, especially if you are reading it late at night. This would live happily amongst horror or mystery genres and is most definitely worth reading. I look forward to Camilla Sten's next offering.